pre-dawn,

I departed Jim’s
Otautahi
abode,

an                      isolate
trinket on a
bicuspid coast,

and
graunched back
into southern
e s c a p a d e:

the snowflooded hills
a sulky doppelganger
of my
own inner
nts
ie
ad
gr

the road rode on,
shamelessly
simulating
direction

as the
few

others who
could be bothered
to be alive that day
fluctuated past me,
fibrillating
spasms
from dead
erections.

hours passed = madmen
released sane =
there was no crux to them -

and in this cloven crease
of time,
I was silent.

Timaru arrived,
dishevelled
and left again
no worse for wear,
while
her autumn leaves
golliwogged in
dying drains.

it was as night
killed again,
I sniffed
Dunedin

&
finally,

somehow

a thin shard of sense
struck back -
a spindly blade
in my
stringy ribs -
to tell me
where I was,
no longer
stabbing
why.

at David’s home
a gulp of wine,
a chortle
of kai

some rumpled sleep
before
the
next inebriate
glissade,

the scurrilous whip
of the nascent chill
speaking an eager
winter
the further
south
I spilled,

poleward,

between bards

and
b   e  y  o  n  d
any

waft

of return.
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